


A Still Voice from Still Water

by Gileonnen



Category: Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone
Genre: Canon-Typical Body Horror, F/M, Handholding, References to Canonical Neckbreaking, The Lure of the Void, Trust and Faith, Undersea Vampires, aquarium dates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 07:49:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: When a vampire comes to Raz and Cat seeking escape from a deep, hungry god, they must decide whether helping her is worth risking the fragile unlife they're building together.





	A Still Voice from Still Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [probablylostrightnow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/probablylostrightnow/gifts).



The full moon rode high over Alt Coulumb, sketching the sea in ink and silver. All of the small craft were already safely docked, the family fishing boats and the sleek smugglers' cutters and the slack-sailed skiffs bobbing at anchor. Only a few iron-sided industrial fishing vessels still glided across the deep water beyond the harbor, and these ran nearly silent.

No one had sighted a gallowglass today, but the beaches were closed for the night all the same. Stranger creatures prowled the waters, these days.

On the deck of the _Rumormonger,_ Tillie Poole rubbed her hands together to warm them. Gloves _and_ mittens, and still her knuckles ached with the unseasonable cold. "May as well haul up the nets," she said. "See if we've caught anything wriggly."

"Don't even say things like that," muttered another sailor. "This one time a few years back, we pulled up a net with one great stonking squid arm in it. Nigh the size of a lifeboat, it was. Don't like to think about where the rest of that beastie got to."

"What did you do with the arm?" asked Tillie.

"Threw it back over the side. You bring a thing like that on shore, you're inviting trouble."

Trouble, reflected Tillie, did not generally care whether it had been invited. Still, she held her breath a little as she and the others heaved on the capstans to pull the nets up on either side. Old superstition, maybe--don't speak of the dead in their hearing. Don't exchange coins under the moonlight.

Don't tempt the ocean to show her underbelly.

The slick nets rose out of the water, still gleaming wetly in the light of the floodlamps amidships. A writhing mass of silver scales came into view: hundreds of fish all gasping for water, gills flaring in dark crescents, green-webbed tails flicking spray. She breathed out. _Nothing eldritch here. Just a whole mess of fish._

They swung the nets around to dump their cargo in the hold, where smoke rose faintly from ice-rimed runes. Fish fell in a rain of silver--and then a dark hand caught the netting and held.

Tillie screamed.

All at once, everyone's knives came out. Thin fishknives, each one gleaming like a sickle moon in the lamplight. Tillie gripped the hilt of her blade. "Who's there?" she called, first in Talbeg, then in Iskari, then at last in the language of Alt Coulumb.

The fingers of the hand flexed on the wet rope. A face turned toward the fisherfolk. The creature was human, or had been human long ago. Its eyes-- _her_ eyes--gleamed like garnets. Her teeth were long. They looked incredibly sharp.

The vampire moved slowly, as though to prove that she could. She lowered herself down the netting, hand over hand, until the balls of her feet touched the deck. Her skin was blue-black in the darkness, here and there bejeweled with accretions of coral and shimmering anemones.

Tillie had seen deep-sea hunters before, whales dappled black and white and sharks endlessly circling in shallow waters. She knew how predators moved. The vampire moved nothing like a predator; she strode across the deck as though she had never known prey she couldn't catch. She drifted toward Tillie like a gallowglass floating beneath dark waters, like a thunderstorm rolling over a mountain range.

She came to a stop just beyond the reach of Tillie's knife. Turning her head, she coughed. Pink-tinged salt water spattered the deck.

Tillie hadn't once seen the vampire breathe.

"I need to speak to Raz Pelham," the vampire said in rough, accented Talbeg. "I need his help."

Slowly, slowly, the vampire raised her empty hands.

It was not surrender. It was a promise: _I have no intention of killing you ... yet._

* * *

"I'm just saying, I wouldn't have chosen an aquarium for a date."

Cat looked up from the plaque beneath a lantern-jawed horror with phosphorescent spikes. Her eyes met Raz's, and she grinned. "It's a free day for cops and firefighters, and they're open late. What should I have done instead, taken you out for dinner?"

Raz grinned back, just the faintest flash of sharp teeth. "Tempting." For all his teasing, he seemed at his ease in the green light filtering through the aquarium tanks. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his white canvas trousers, his shoulders relaxed. His smile crept up to his eyes.

They could tease about dinners, these days. It was progress.

This close to closing time, the aquarium was almost empty. The families with their curious children had long since gone home, and even the artists had packed up their portfolios and easels shortly after sunset. But as Cat watched witchlight break into rainbow-edged ripples on the polished tile floor, she thought that the place had its own strange beauty after dark. She could step into the glass tunnel beneath the main tank and see the shadows of fish moving, their formations shattering and coalescing anew above her head. Along the bottom of the tank, seaweed waved in a faint, circular current.

Out of the corner of her eye, Cat glimpsed the faint sheen of Craft above a warding rune. When she turned to look at the rune directly, though, she saw only glass smudged with children's fingerprints.

It was nothing like being at the bottom of the sea. That was what Cat liked best about the aquarium.

"Really is beautiful," said Raz. His voice echoed from the curved glass walls of the tunnel, hollow and resonant at once. "I hadn't thought you'd want to see something like this again, after ..."

"After what? That wasn't the hardest thing I've ever done. Not even the hardest thing I've ever done with you. Remember that time I broke your neck?"

"Who could forget?"

"Exactly. That gives me nightmares. Fish, not so much."

An eel striped in yellow, white, and blue came up to the glass to regard them. _It probably can't see anything but its own reflection,_ thought Cat, but she raised her hand to the glass anyway. It was cold to the touch.

The eel nosed against the glass as she dragged her finger in lazy whorls over the surface. Everywhere she touched, it followed.

"Can it hear my pulse?" she asked, low. "Can it feel the heat of my hand?"

Raz caught her by the palm and folded their hands together. Her warmth bled into him and lingered there.

They stood like that until a voice came over the speakers, warning that there were only five minutes until closing. The witchlight overhead dimmed.

They departed the artificial warmth of the aquarium and stepped into the chill winter air. Winter in Alt Coulumb wasn't all that cold, when measured against the unmelting ice palaces of Deathless Koschei or the frozen wastes where Raz sometimes waited out mortal pirate-hunters, but it was plenty cold for Cat. "Hot Town?" she offered. "Tired of thinking about fish. I could use a little dancing."

They stepped out from under the aquarium's awning, and moonlight struck Cat's face in a wave of rapture. Glory licked down every nerve, power and glory unending--she rose on wings of silver-white fire, shedding ice from her eyes and fingertips.

 _Someone needs your help,_ said the goddess Seril in a voice of a trillion bells.

 _Shit, don't_ do _that! I've told you a thousand fucking times! Fuck!_ said Cat.

 _Sorry,_ said Seril. Her laugh caroled through Cat's skull as the Suit bloomed over her, sleek and silver.

_You aren't._

Seril released her. Cat landed on her feet, but somewhere else.

She straightened from her crouch and tried to get her bearings. A thick white mist rolled off of the sea and washed over the docks, where people in oilcloth slickers hauled fish from an icy hold into an icy warehouse. Although they didn't seem to notice her, there was a wariness to their movements that reminded her of criminals afraid of getting caught.

Or decent people afraid of getting hurt.

Cat scanned the docks, listening to the tense creaking of moored boats and the lapping of waves. Nothing out there looked like a threat, although she wouldn't have liked having that great misty void full of sea terrors at her back.

When she looked back toward the shore, Cat caught a faint flash of movement. Straining her eyes, saw a shadow by a coil of rope. She stepped closer.

There, a dark-skinned woman sat with her wrists and ankles bound. She was naked, but the cold didn't seem to bother her. Seawater still dripped from her slick body, and blind white crabs crawled through her long, lank hair.

She looked up Cat and gave her a smile full of knives--and then the world melted into moonlight.

Cat fell to her knees in front of the aquarium. The heat went out of her in a rush, leaving her gasping.

Raz offered her a hand; she didn't take it. She climbed back to her feet on her own, dusting off her palms on her slacks. Her throat felt like it was full of broken glass. "Seril wants us to go to the docks."

"Mm?" He looked worried.

"And." She coughed. "I think it's for you."

* * *

When Cat arrived at the docks, she felt the fisherfolk relax, which was never a good sign. No one ever liked seeing Cat show up silverclad unless there was something worse nearby. "I've heard that there's a vampire here," she said, daring anyone to comment on the vampire directly behind her.

A woman with her hair tied up in a scarf came to the foot of the stairs leading up to the street. "We found her in our nets. She said she wanted to speak to a Raz Pelham, so we sent word to the Blacksuits as soon as we got back. That was right, wasn't it?"

"It was," Cat said shortly. "This is Raz Pelham. Where is she?"

"There." The woman pointed across the dock to where a few coils of rope lay on an oilcloth tarp. "She said we could tie her up if it would make us feel better, so we did, but. Um. I don't know how much good rope would do if she actually wanted to get out. She looks ..." Her face twisted in a way that Cat knew all too well.

_She looks like something that was never human--like a creature that cloaked itself in human skin to hunt us better. She looks like the formless hunger that chases us through nightmares, poured into a sack of ribs and teeth and viscera._

She was beautiful the way the void was beautiful. She was something that would swallow you up.

Even after all this time, that thought made Cat's knees weak.

"Did she say what she wants with me?" Raz asked.

"I didn't ask," the woman said.

Cat paced across the dock. The boards creaked under her feet, singing of salt and sea. She squatted down in front of the vampire.

"Hey," she said. "What's your name?"

When the vampire straightened, the ropes binding her tensed almost to snapping. "I used to be called Gazi'an," she said in Talbeg. Her voice sounded like rusted gears trying to turn. Someone, some silverclad Serilite listening through Cat's ears, observed that her Talbeg was accented not because it was rough but because it was _old_. "Suppose that will do."

Cat felt more than heard Raz slide up behind her, his footsteps shadow-soft even on the warped wood. The vampire raised her eyes to Raz's. Cat saw recognition there, keener than hunger. Then she slithered out of the ropes as though they were water.

Behind Cat, someone screamed, but Cat barely noticed. Her hand was already at Gazi'an's throat, closed on that fragile cage of bone and cartilage as though it would do a single damn bit of good to break her neck.

Gazi'an smiled and raised her hands. Her wrists shed shreds of hemp. "No need for that, little priestess," she said. "The deep gods didn't send me. Blood didn't call me from the water. I came of my own accord."

"Now this, I've got to hear," muttered Raz.

Reluctantly, Cat released Gazi'an's neck. Her hand left an impression in the flesh, still faintly gleaming with moonlight. _Seril said someone needed our help. She isn't usually wrong about that._ "Why are you here, then? What do you want?"

Unfettered, the vampire swayed toward Raz. Sea snails dripped from her hair and pattered to the boards. They fled, slowly, trailing silver in their wake. "You could have chosen the sea," Gazi'an said in that eerie, broken-music-box voice. "You would have had a ruined palace beneath the waves, and you would have fed on the blood of drowning gods. But instead you chose this." She swept a seaweed-tangled hand across the harbor, taking in the clam boats and the bankers' yachts and the fisherfolk in their sea-spumed slickers.

"You're sort of making my point for me," Raz answered. His voice was even. "If you're trying to convince me to go back there--"

Gazi'an laughed like a bubbling drain. Cat and Raz glanced uneasily at one another, that old unspoken signal that _someone_ was going to have to speak first.

Neither of them found words before Gazi'an did. "I don't want you to go back," she said. " _I_ want you to help me escape."

* * *

Gazi'an let herself be wrapped in a slicker and marched down to the station, and she only smiled that lanternfish smile when they locked her in a holding cell. "Steel bars won't be much better than wet paper if she decides she wants to be out," Cat warned. "I've seen how strong she is."

"Seril can hold her while the moon is up, and she won't try anything by daylight," said the duty officer. "But we can't keep her here for long without charging her. As far as we know, she hasn't done anything."

"As far as we know," said Cat. "Can't hurt to double-check. I'll see what I can find tomorrow morning."

After that, she and Raz fetched up like driftwood in her apartment. As soon as she'd locked the door behind her, Cat threw her keys down on the table and sank onto the couch. Her bones felt leaden. Her temples throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Putting the Suit back on would help a little, but only a little--you could only be drunk on glory so long before your body remembered it was made of meat. 

Raz sat down beside her without a word. He drew her head into his lap and massaged her brows with merciless fingertips. Cat closed her eyes, letting her cheek warm his thigh as he inscribed shallow spirals on her skull.

Her thoughts drifted back to the vampire on the shore, then further back, to that sunken plaza where Raz had made his bargain with something deep and old and hungry. She remembered the pressure of the endless ocean against her Suit, the clear and aching cold that pierced her quicksilver armor like a fang.

She shivered. "Do you believe her? You think she really wants some kind of ... fuck, I don't even know. What is there for her up here? Just sun and hunger."

"Sun and hunger and cops looking for an excuse to bust you for piracy."

"I think that one's just you, Raz."

"Mm." He stroked Cat's hair back from her brow. "Maybe that's all it is. Up here, it's just her. Everything else is quiet."

"You're saying the vampires down there have some kind of hive mind?"

"Not exactly. I told a demon once that this thing they gave me--the thing their blood let me touch for just a moment--it's old. And it's simple. Just a hunger so vast that there's nothing outside of it."

Cat reached up to touch his cheek. Her thumb grazed a fang, razor-sharp with promise, then caught unscathed in the corner of Raz's lips. "You think she wants to be outside of it."

"It's that or be consumed by it."

"Can you be sure she hasn't already?"

"I guess that's what we try to find out tomorrow."

Sucking in a breath, Cat said, "I'm not letting that thing have you. I don't care how big or old it is. If it comes for you, it will have to come through me. If it takes you anyway, I'll find a knife sharp enough to carve you out of it."

Raz caught her hand and held it pressed against his face. "Not that I don't appreciate the support, but that's like saying you'd carve a planet out of orbit. I felt this thing once, and it's more elemental than Craft. It's more elemental than the gods. It draws you in the way the ground draws you in when you fall."

"All things are possible through the grace of Seril. She's given me a righteous power for wrecking shit."

"Just figured I'd tell you what you were getting into."

She smiled. "I know what I'm getting into. Or I don't know, exactly, but I don't plan on stopping."

When she opened her eyes, she saw that he was smiling back.

That night, the two of them curled up together in Cat's bed to wait out the darkness. Thick curtains mantled off the approaching dawn.

* * *

At the station, Cat poured herself a huge mug of coffee from the communal coffeepot. There was instant chocolate in a big bag beside the pot, so she dumped a few spoonfuls in and stirred it into a sludge. She knocked back the whole cup in three long swallows, then rinsed the mug in the sink and found an unoccupied desk.

Today was technically her day off, but the duty officer had been right--they could only hold the vampire so long if they couldn't prove she'd committed a crime. There was always trespassing, but Cat was a little fuzzy on whether that counted on the open ocean. Which meant that there was nothing to do but go through the files.

She took out a clean silver bowl and a knife inlaid with abalone, then dragged the blade across her palm. Blood speckled the inside of the bowl, a bright ruby red that shaded darker as it began to pool.

Cat caught her badge in her free hand. She held Seril's image in her mind: the goddess clad in shadow and song, moonlight streaming from her eyes in cascades of silver.

 _Someone needs Your help,_ Cat thought. Then she fixed her eyes on the bowl, on the red-black pool of blood at the bottom, and let it become her entire world. The station dissolved into darkness. The Suit spilled over her, quicksilver and ice; she fell unwinged through banks of boiling clouds.

And then the voices came. _Please, someone, they took my handbag, everything I had was in it_ and _Someone help, my little boy is missing_ and _Someone, anyone, get help, she's dying_ and and and and--

Someone heard.

A silverclad officer took the details of the theft. Creatures of granite and lime spread heavy wings to comb the streets. A street crier lent her voice to the call for help, doubling it and redoubling it until the streets rang with the song of it. Neighbors came to bear a dying woman to the hospital on a dozen outstretched hands.

Someone heard, and everywhere, Seril's people answered.

Cat emerged from the files many hours later, when the last evening sunlight slanted through the station windows. Her blood had dried in the bowl, and the cut on her hand had closed. The Suit seeped away and left her feeling dizzy, elated, drained.

She got herself another coffee and sipped it while she sifted through the records in her mind. Many inexplicable disasters, and a staggeringly ugly murder, but nothing that felt even a little like a vampire.

As the moon nudged up over the neighboring rooftops, Cat went to the holding cells. Someone had thoughtfully curtained them off. The guard on duty gave her a very tense salute as she crossed to Gazi'an's cell.

The vampire sat in one corner, legs crossed, back braced against the walls. Her eyes were fixed on the door; when Cat peered in, she gave a cavernous smile. In Talbeg, she asked, "Is your suspicion satisfied, little priestess?"

"I'm ready to listen."

Gazi'an rose from her seat. She still wore the borrowed slicker, so huge on her skeletal frame that it looked like a ceremonial robe. "Then ask your questions."

Cat's fingertips traced her badge. "How are you here? The way Raz makes it sound, your 'deep gods' are some kind of vortex that drags people in. The only way to get out is not to get caught in the first place."

A soft laugh, like the chuckle of a brook. "They're already within us, priestess. They're what makes us what we are. You know that--you know what it feels like to have teeth in your wrist. You've felt their hunger pulling you down, and down, and down. Raz Pelham knows that. You know it. You _know_."

"Then what? Why are you _here_ , if you can't ever get away from them?"

Gazi'an gripped the bars of the cell door. Even now, her fingers were slick enough to leave trails of saltwater on the steel. She glanced down at Cat's cut palm, then back up to meet Cat's eyes. "I've eaten so many people, priestess. I've drained them dry and left their corpses to wither and rot, and still there was a void in me. Still I thirsted. I've drunk from a star kraken deep under the water; I've drained a god bound in iron chains, and as his blood spilled down my mouth, still I thirsted.

"If I consumed every man and woman and tiny baby, I would not be full. If I drained the seas, I would not be full. If I chased the demons between the stars, hunted them down to the last monster and drank their crystal blood, would it fill me up? If I tore the stars open with my teeth, would they requite me? When I've consumed the universe, what would be left for me but this void and my own endless hunger?"

She laughed and dropped her hands. " _I_ would drain the stars. But when Raz Pelham looked into that void and felt its promise, all the glory and power of the abyss, he turned away. That's what I came here to learn: how to turn away from the abyss. How to love something enough to preserve it."

In the part of her that still thrilled to the promise of jagged teeth, Cat understood.

 _Someone needs your help,_ thought Cat. "Come with me," she said. "We can't hold you much longer anyway--and there's someone you should meet."

She led the vampire out to the street, into the cold air. At this hour, the food carts had packed up and the shops were starting to close. Cat's stomach twisted, reminding her that she hadn't eaten yet today. _Later._

Clutching her badge in her bloodied hand, she spread silver wings against the evening sky.

When Cat held out her hand, Gazi'an took it. When Cat wrapped her up in her arms, Gazi'an let herself be held. Still clutching the vampire like an eagle with a fish in its talons, Cat rose above the rooftops and winged through the icy air to the high temple of Seril.

The ruin had begun to reshape itself, after Seril had regained the skies. Sparse marble columns flanked an approach flooded with moonlight, leading to a throne of shadow and starlight.

Upon that throne, Seril sat with her chin on her fist and light spilling between her fingers.

" _Come here, child_ ," she said, and her voice was the keen, clear song of water on glass. That voice went through Cat like a sword through vapor and left her shaking with joy. " _You want something to protect. Will you protect my city?_ "

Cat released Gazi'an, who straightened. She shed the slicker and stood naked before the goddess. Moonlight picked out every rib.

Slowly, each footstep bleeding seawater, Gazi'an crossed the moonlit floor to the throne.

Her fangs flashed in the thick white light. For an instant, Cat was sure she meant to drink from Seril's throat--then that moment passed, and Gazi'an fell to her knees.

"I'll try," she said.

" _Then rise,_ " Seril answered, " _my new priestess. I have a task for you._ "

* * *

The _Kell's Bounty_ ploughed the deep water off Alt Coulumb with a brisk breeze at her back. "You're sure you want to do this," said Raz.

"I'm sure," said Gazi'an.

"No one would blame you if you just ran off with a nice little skiff and fished clams for the rest of your life."

"I would," said Gazi'an.

Cat leaned against the rail of the ship and let the wind tear at her hair. The air was so cold that her teeth hurt, but she found herself relishing it all the same. It had been too long since the _Kell's Bounty_ had left the harbor--too long since Raz had dared the hungry sea.

He was resplendent under the mast lantern, his crisp white shirt showing plainly against his dark skin, his red eyes alight. When he thought she wasn't looking, she caught him touching frame and ladder and rail with a lover's fond caresses.

Maybe it should have made her jealous, but it didn't. Cat had come into his life after the _Kell's Bounty_ , and she knew there was room in his heart for both of them.

Above them, the clouds parted briefly, revealing the crescent moon on a field of distant stars. Gazi'an tilted her face back to look.

 _You can change your mind,_ Cat thought, but she didn't say it. Gazi'an already knew that, the way Cat had known when she'd sworn herself to Seril.

She could change her mind, but she wouldn't. She'd already made her choice.

When the clouds veiled the moon again, Gazi'an gathered herself up and leapt from the boat. She pierced the waves like an arrow, scarcely rippling the dark water. A stream of froth broke the surface and dispersed.

"Not much moonlight at the bottom of the ocean," said Raz softly. "Seril won't be able to help her if she gets into trouble."

"She knows that," Cat answered. "But she still thought it was worth sending someone to help them. And Gazi'an's willing to try."

Raz squeezed her hand. His smile touched his eyes. "You don't think they're beyond help."

Cat elbowed his ribs. "Neither do you."

By now, Alt Coulumb was barely a sliver of light on the horizon, dividing one darkness from another, greater darkness. "You should head home soon," said Raz. "It's a long flight."

Cat leaned in for a long, salt-tasting kiss. His teeth scraped her lip, teasing her with sweetness. "Let's make it a longer one."

When Cat tugged him toward his cabin, Raz laughed and let himself be pulled.


End file.
